Paisley

Somewhere around September last year I realised that with my writing schedule becoming heavier I needed a new batch of characters that didn't have a contextual restraint behind them.

Characters that I could use to explore new and different themes without either breaking an existing characters narrative or creating a loop in a story, in effect characters I could explore ideas with that didn't have to be bound to a far larger body of work and ideas that gave me a mental break from the deeper side of writing stories.

I started looking around for inspiration and kept seeing all these kid influencers cropping up on Instagram and just about everywhere else, so I wondered about creating a character that would be exactly that, an influencer, someone overtly proud of themselves and almost defiantly outgoing.

I spent a month or so toying around with a couple of base designs, before refining one but keeping the skin from the second design and adapting both the skin and character to match each other. Paisley was created in Blender, then textured using Mari before being rigged as a genesis 8.1 character for posing with Daz studio.

Additionally I wanted her to have spots, marks and flaws, all the flaws that makes humans exactly human, things that would tarnish her self esteem but not enough to stop her from being confident, even if at times that confidence is just a veil. Paisley's skin was mapped four times until I got all the blemishes and imperfections that I wanted and then offset them with a set of light grey/blue eyes to make her look quite piercing, I like that in gaze in outgoing characters.

I wanted Paisley to be cute but in quite a brazen way but I also wanted her to be less than perfect with the idea being she would silently be a nod about learning to accept and be proud of yourself, no matter what skin you are in.